Topic 187: Bill Ayers, "Fugitive Days"

Joining us in Inkwell today is former Weatherman Bill Ayers, who'll be
spending the next couple weeks here talking about his book, "Fugitive Days."
These days, Bill is the father of three grown children and lives in Chicago
with his partner, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bernardine's 91-year-old mother,
Dorothy. He has written several books about the intellectual and moral
demands of teaching, and the challenges facing families, children and youth,
including "To Teach" (Teachers College Press) and "A Kind and Just Parent"
(Beacon Press). He teaches in the College of Education at the University of
Illinois at Chicago where he is Distinguished Professor and Senior
University Scholar.
Leading the conversation with Ayers is Andy Klein, an LA-based film critic,
currently writing for the new CityBeat and ValleyBeat weeklies. He is,
not coincidentally, the cohost of The WELL's <movies.> conference and its
two spawn, <video.> and <videovault.>. Who would ever guess that, long
before he focused his energy on the likes of "Charlie's Angels 2: Full
Throttle" and "Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno," he
got his journalistic start in 1969, working for Liberation News Service,
which at the time was sort of the AP of the underground press?
Mostly he collated and stapled but occasionally was let loose on the
typewriters. (For those who follow such things and have long memories,
this was during what might be called the "hard politics" phase of LNS,
about a year after the politics/drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll split colorfully,
if not altogether accurately, chronicled in Ray Mungo's "Famous Long
Ago.") He did a bunch of other stuff identified with the late sixties
(which actually, in this context, means 1967-1975) and wishes there were
still a coherent left in the U.S. nowadays, when the situation is
arguably more dire.
Welcome, Bill and Andy.

Hi, Bill.
I'm a little embarrassed that I gave Cynthia so much biographical data
that my paragraph ended up as lengthy as it did, since -- of course --
we're here to talk about you and your book and its subject: the direction
that your life took over the course of several decades, but particularly
during the sixties and early seventies.
I'll leave it to you to describe things in more detail, but your story
strikes me as one of the extremer versions of a fairly common (though by
no means universal) "sixties" experience. That is, starting from a
privileged background, always feeling restless and out-of-place with the
expected educational/career trajectory, and becoming engaged in politics
because of the Vietnam War.
But your new trajectory led to an escalation in your sense of what
constituted social struggle -- in a direction and to a degree that not
many of us experienced. Which is to say: A lot of us were heading in that
direction, but not many of us ended up in Weatherman.
Do you want to talk about that transformation? And how your view of it
has changed over the last thirty-odd years?

Hello---The thing that's easy to forget and yet somehow today utterly
urgent to remember is that our government was engaged in a brutal war
against a small Asian nation 10,000 miles away,and with all the
familiar Orwellian rhetoric of democracy and freedom and progress in
place, it was slaughtering 2000 people a day in our names.How to stop
it?By 1968 we had moved from a tiny opposition---I was arrested in a
draft board in 1965 with 38 others while several hundred fellow
citizens called for our heads---to a majority of the American people
asking their government to stop the war.What to do?Each day,in spite of
the popular will here and there,2000 would be thrown into the furnace
of death.And for how long?Now we know that 3,000,000 would die
needlessly--an absolute horror but nonetheless finite--not,say
300,000,000,but that's hindsight.So we had to choose in the dark.Some
of my friends chose to organize within the Democratic Party,others to
work in factories and build a left opposition there,still others to
leave the country.I chose to build a capacity to survive what I thougt
was an impending American facism---the imperial project was already
visiting a facist-like state of affairs in Indochina,Africa,parts of
Latin America as well as the ghettos of our cites---to resist,make the
cost of empire higher,fight back,and,yes,a bit immodestly,make a
reolution that could prevent future wars,bring about racial and
economic justice,restore some balance to the world.I was
determined,despairing sometimes,hopeful other times,and a bit over the
top....But then,who had it figured out right?And have that person write
and tell us what to do now in this gathering darkness...

I guess what I'm getting at is the different varieties of regret or even
just of reevaluation: that is, I think there are things you wish you had
done differently. When you look back, do you feel regret that you may have
exercised bad decision-making? Or feel that, given the information you
had, the decision was right, but the information was incomplete or false?
Or regrets over things that might have been the best decisions at the
time, in terms of the percentages, but didn't work out anyway?
Okay, an analogy: a mountain village is going to be wiped out by the
plague; you have the vaccine, and there are two ways to get to the
village. You can take the long path around the base of the mountain, but
by the time you arrive, many people will have died...even a small chance
that everyone will have. There is a dangerous rocky ledge around the upper
part of the mountain that will take far less time to traverse: if you can
make it around the ledge, very few people, maybe noone, will die. But the
best mountain guide tells you that there is a 20% chance the ledge will
give out. Given the odds and the possible benefits, you decide to risk the
ledge. But the 20% chance defeats you. This is that 1 out of 5 times where
you lose. (Or maybe the mountain guide wasn't right about those odds.) You
wish you had made the other choice; but you don't necessarily think it was
the illogical choice, given what you had to work with.
What I'm dancing around here is: The book is haunted by one central event
-- which I will leave it to you to explain. I have no doubt that you wish
you had a time machine to go back and prevent it. But do you now think the
logic that led up to the tragedy was a wrong path? Or a reasonable path
that turned out badly?

Just checking in. Bill, yours is a very evocative book that brought
back a lot of memories of the times -- although I'm about 6 years
younger than you and was just on the fringe of things. I was the
only student in my Catholic High School to be a member of SDS, and
I helped start a small underground paper.
I was asked here by Cynthia because I've written a reference book
on terrorism (for Facts on File). I certainly don't claim to be an
expert on Weather-things though.
One question to throw in the pot is this: from your experience and
that of your friends and colleagues, what would you tell people today
who (from various ideological angles) are in the process of
deciding that drastic actions are necessary against perceived
oppressors? Or to be a bit more provocative: what are the ethics of
radical action? You make a distinction between what you
participated in and terrorism, but most mainstream experts in the
field would classify it as terrorism -- the use of violence by a
non-govermental group to achieve a political or social end. (The
same action by a government is classified as "state terrorism" by the
way -- and Noam Chomsky in particular has quite a critique of
conventional thinking about terrorism.)

Good question, Harry.
I'm looking forward to following along here. I was but a lad in the era in
question, but it's clear to me that it had profound effects on my outlook.
The numbers of Vietnamese dead were really brought home to me by a piece at
MOMA a bit over ten years ago. It was called "The Other VietNam Memorial,"
at a time when Maya Lin's memorial was still pretty new. It was metal, and
very tall -- at least twenty feet, I think. It had lots of metal blades,
each also very tall, sticking out of it. As I entered the room, trying to
"get" it, I thought that it looked like a machine part, maybe part of a
turbine or something. So, I'm thinking, maybe it's some war machinery? The
comment is on all the unexploded ordinance left behind? And I get closer and
closer and can see something's inscribed on the blades. That they're panels
with writing on them, and there are like a couple levels of them high and a
goodly number, at least fifteen and maybe thirty, around the thing. When I
get close, I see they move, so you can survey them. And I see what they say.
Le Duc Tho. Nguyen Phong. And so on and so on and so on and so on. Name
after name after name. Unfthomably many. My mind still draws up short
reflecting on it.

Your image from MOMA is haunting and exactly the point---a radical
lesson:every human life is of value,each an entire universe to be
treated with a measure of reverance and awe...I was taken with the
profiles of grief in the NY Times after the catastrophe of Sept.11,and
I read them religiously every morning as a kind of ritual.And then our
government,inevitably it seems,lashed out and started killing
nameless,numberless others.They each had a mother and a father
also,they had likes and dislikes,friends and their own little quirky
ways of living and being,but of course they won't show up in the
Times.So then I stopped reading the profiles---they had become a
segregated and exclusive space....On radical action:I guess I think
that in a world so violent and oppressive to so many,a world so
dramatically out of balance and in desperate need of repair,there must
be a lot that each of us can find to do.History is not something that
happened and now sits on a shelf somewhere....It's happening now and no
one knows the future.But for sure tomorrow depends on what we do or
don't do today,so we ought to all get busy.The problems,the horrors,the
challenges are deep.We live in the headquarters of an aggressive and
violent empire,a country built on stolen land and stolen labor,a
country out of balance and desperately denying any wrongdoing.There is
work to be done,work that involves remaking ourselves and our culture
in order to free the planet.....The questions we face are huge ehical
and political and strategic questions,not little tactical ones.But I
must object to a definition of terrorism that is both too large and too
small.The use of violence by a non-govt.group....both lets the main
perpetrators of terror thruout history off the hook,and conflates the
actions of Bin Laden with the Berrigans,the Brownshirts with John Brown
and Nat Turner,the Klan with the African National Congress.A firmer
definition,which applies to all groups,is the killing of innocents to
achieve a political end.We still have to figure out the question of a
just cause,but terrorism is never really defensible,and in my book I
try to show a group of young people flirting with the idea of answering
official terror with a terror of our own,never pulling it off and
finally renouncing it as an option....

earlier you asked if i thought we had taken a reasonable path or the
wrong path. i guess the book tries to answer that question by showing
what it felt like to make choices basically in the dark not knowing how
things would turn out. of course i'd give anything to take back march
6th 1970 and to play it differently. but that's not the way life is.
i'd also liek the war in viet nam to have ended in 1968 or to have
never begun, etc. etc. we were not wrong to oppose the war in viet nam
and the murder of leaders of the black mvmt. with every fiber of our
being. of course we were young, impulsive, desperate, sometimes off the
track, so next time i hope we are wiser, more incisive, more
sophisticated, and more effective.
yes, i've thought about writing this book for 25 years. but it took
some time for me to feel that i had a bit of perspective and enough
experience to capture the complexity on the page. i dont know whether i
succeded or not. but i decided that it was now or never. because i had
reached an age where i could remember enough but clearly i was
forgetting more and more.

This reader thinks you did succeed in putting us in your shoes and
feeling the passions and wrenching events of the time. I did have
some trouble with your prefatory ambiguity that seemed to be
suggesting that what I would be reading was in some essence true
but not necessarily factual. In a way this is true of all memory
and of all history (and your theme of memory is also well done, I
think.) But it means that when one tries to grapple with the ethics
of some concrete decision we don't really know whether we should
treat it as a sort of case study based on history, contains
something factual, or is perhaps a sort of parable. But I would
imagine that in part you had to introduce this ambiguity for legal
reasons.
Similarly, you understandably don't write in any detail about the
extent of your involvement in the later bombings, if any.
Having read a lot about various aspects of terrorism, I think
reading your book did give me a more nuanced view of the subject.
(I've already mentioned Chomsky's critique of the traditional
definitions). If I understand correctly, most of you saw the
bombings as symbolic acts and you used multiple channels to give
warning beforehand. As far as I know no one was ever hurt, and the
property damage was minimal to moderate. This is different from,
for example, Ted Kaczynski, who certainly had symbolism in mind,
but also wanted to inflict maximum pain on individual persons.
One consequence of 911 is that any future group that tried to do
what your group did would not have any control of its "message" and
would be massively crushed. How you lived and made your decisions
is still important, even if the tactics are no longer relevant.
One more -- your theme and description of "going under"
(underground) was also very well done. It related to a theme I've
always been interested in real life and in fiction--the existence
of parallel worlds. In effect, you didn't go somewhere that was
hidden: you created a parallel world that had the same people and
things as the mainstream world, but a different context. You hid by
changing context.
I wonder if you ever had the opportunity to compare notes with any
FBI or CIA veterans about your "tradecraft" in those days. It sounds
to me like they would have respected it on a professional level.

Jesse Staniforth writes:
Bill,
I'm a 25 year old writer in Montreal, politically active and radical, but
not myopically-- I have a life outside my politics, whereas many others I
know do not. For years I was a "student" of the 60s-- starting with books by
Hoffman and Rubin as a teenager, I worked my way into learning about the
radical movements, their victories and their failures. I was always
fascinated with Weatherman/WUO for a variety of reasons, not the least of
which was its yin-yang of confidence/arrogance, of carpe-diem action coupled
with support for the kind of brutality I found repulsive.
What I'm wondering if you could address is the relationship between a middle
class upbringing and a militaristic, "revolutionary" approach to social
change. Because, in spite of criticisms (like those of Ward Churchill) that
have called pacifism the apathetic refuge of privileged leftists, it has
often seemed to me that the violence of groups like Weatherman/WUO was
connected somehow to a feeling among their privileged membership that they
needed to prove themselves committed to the cause beyond the shadow of a
doubt. Do you think that was the case for you, for Ms. Dohrn, or for others
you knew?
On a related note, do you think it is possible to argue that the obsession
with violent change shared by many privileged activists to this day comes
from a misunderstanding of how social change works?
It has been my opinion that for those raised in comfort, it is not easy to
see the hard truth that social change rarely happens quickly or
entertainingly, and when it does it costs the lives of many underprivileged
people. As exciting and seemingly convenient as radical violent change
appears on the surface, its underside is the blood of the working classes,
an issue, in my opinion, that militants quietly sidestep. I've always
doubted that those calling for "class war" would fight such a war, believing
instead that they would stand back to watch the poor fight and die before
taking up the reins of power at the conclusion of such hostilities.
Do you agree with any of these points? Have your experiences taught you
similarly or otherwise? While I've read that Mark Rudd has articulated
similar sentiments, have your years taught you differently?
Thank you,
Jesse Staniforth
Montreal, PQ

Harry -- the ambiguity was not a legal expression but an attempt to be
real about the complexity and ambiguity of life as it is lived. I
admit that beginning a memoir with the phrase "memory is a
motherfucker, I myslef remember nothing" is throwing down a bit of a
gauntlet to the reader. Is he going to tell the truth, or not? The fact
is, I do tell the truth as I experienced it and understand it. But I
don't make many claims that my experience is all experience. the
actions of the WUO were mainly a form of intense, armed education. They
weren't about inflicting pain on people, but rather showing the nature
of the system, and its vulnerability. Again, in the book I don't
portray our actions or our work as in any sense the work of a vanguard,
or the only resistance worth doing.
Jesse -- I want to think about a longer response to several of your
points, but just a quick take.... I am not sure what "brutality" you
are referring to in regard to the WUO. I don't think I had or have an
obsession with violent change. I certainly grew up in privilege but
most of my associates and comrades did not. Bernardine for example, was
very much the product of a striving lower middle class jewish
immigrant family.... Hmmm The real problem with most of the discussion
about violence is that the powerful, the rulers, have what appears to
be a monopoly on violence and they use it not just occasionaly, but
daily, constantly. And moreover, violence is built into the structures
and the culture that we live in. It is invisible to us and yet if you
stop and take a look around you will see that violence is at the heart
of so many social relationships including occupier/occupied,
police/community, worker/boss, school/children, men/women, or even just
the toys we market for our kids, the entertainment we consume and on
and on....

Jesse Staniforth wrrites:
Bill,
Thank you very much for your prompt reply. Almost instantly upon rereading
my initial post I regretted the use of the word "brutality," because the
things that I was thinking of were isolated incidents-- namely Ms. Dohrn's
famous comments on the Manson killings, and the Days of Rage demonstration
in Chicago. Both these things, with the benefit of 34 years of hindsight,
appear particularly senseless in their violence, especially given their
consequences, which I have only read to be negative (born 7 years after the
fact, all I know of this is from reading about it). Likewise, in using that
word I was thinking in terms of the bomb that killed Diana Oughton, Ted
Gold, and Terry Robbins, which I understand was a shrapnel bomb destined for
a gathering of military personnel and their families. I should make clear
that I understand and respect that the majority of the violent actions
undertaken by WUO were against buildings and symbols, and that human beings
related to the targets were given warnings prior to these attacks.
My apologies for assuming a privileged background for members of WUO. I was
under the impression that most participants were from middle-to-upper-middle
class backgrounds. That said, however, I'm still interested in your comments
on violence in the service of social change.
It is certainly true that violence is a central structure governing most
social relationships. When the laws of the land and the policy of the state
are grounded in brutal force, it seems natural that eventually all other
relationships will align themselves with some kind of violence. I agree that
it is essential to oppose this violence and work to minimize it whenever
possible. What I wonder, however, is whether violence can be used challenge
such a pervasive culture of violence. Given your perspective, do you believe
that symbolic violence can be used to affect positive change?
Similarly, do you feel you can empathize with the reasoning of those like
Mark Rudd who have concluded that the inherent violence in our society can
only be opposed through non-violent resistance? I agree so incredibly
strongly with you that, as you said, "every human life is of value ... to be
treated with a measure of reverence and awe." I wonder do you find it
difficult to apply that standard to the politicians, corporate owners,
military, and police whose actions form the core of the violence we oppose?
Thanks again.

Hey Jesse---Thanx for responding...The thing about institutionalized
violence is precisely that we are all participating whether we want to
or not.I have enormous respect in most cases for those who choose in a
principled way to participate by laying their bodies on the machinery
of violence as an act of resistance and on the side of
humanity,progress,dignity,democracy,and justice.MLK of course comes to
mind as a direct action warrior,a pacifist to be sure but one who
wrestled with the world and was neither settled nor satisfied.But few
who claim the mantle of nonviolence ever push themselves to test its
meaning in action---don't be one of them.Further most who urge only
nonviolence---and remember Nixon Bush,and all the rest lecture the
opposition on the value of peaceful protest,but I'm not referring to
them here---cannot answer the question,But what about the Jews of
Europe?Ghandi actually did answer,and what he said was consistent but
entirely unacceptable to me and I suspect to most people:they should he
instructed commit mass suicide in the millions.Similarly what should
the African slaves in the US have done?Sit-in?Was Tubman justified in
carrying a pistol?What should a principled person do?Slavery was
legal,normal,acceptable to most citizens....It was also violent to the
core whether it ever brke out visibly or not.A hundred years from
now---if we survive which is an open and an urgent question--people
will note the deaths of children in Guatemala as a result of US
policies as normal,legal,and violent exterminations,quietly
executed.What will you and I do?I consider myself an unviolent
person---violence scares me,upsets me,and makes me sick.But I can't
escape so easily and simply decry violence as I sip my latte,because I
choose to live with my eyes open.I see it everywhere and I participate
one way or another.Pretending to be neutral on a moving train is
delusional and deadly....
Social change is difficult,complex,tough---but I don't see why you
raise the question of how long it takes since that's unknowable.The
American rev.was pretty quick,the South African struggle longer---both
incidentally geared toward justice and democracy and with armed
struggle as a central component not because of obsession or delusion
but because it seemed a component to victory over determined and
violent foes.In any case King consistently railed against the
go-slowers.No one knows the future---neither the triumphalist Bushites
nor the vulgar Marxists---but what we do or don't do will help
determine what's in play.Get busy...

I don't think the challenges we face are tactical.Mostly they're
political and pedagogical.We need to learn and teach constantly,test
our ideas in practice,talk to our neighbors and coworkers,hear their
hopes and fears and participate as concerned and sometimes outraged
citizens.The new American empire spells grief for the people of the
world and for us.We should mobilize,educate,agitate,act,doubt,free our
imaginations and act again.Always learning,always acting in order to
learn and change more...

Oh---I don't find it difficult to think of the right wing terrorists
running the country as fully human....too easy to say they're monsters
or nonhuman which allows us to dehumanize them and in the process
ourselves.There were slave owners who loved their children,paid their
bills and were kind to their fellows,and Nazis who were personally
nice.This makes them complicated like everyone,but neither moral nor
worthy of our hesitation in ridding the world of the system they
support..

Bill, thank you for the opportunity to electronically converse and
debate these still-lingering questions from the '60s. One thought that
came up over and over for me as I read "Fugitive Days" isn't very
original, but: In certain ways the political situation in the U.S.
today parallels the situation in the mid-60s, so why hasn't resistance
to Bush Administration policies reached critical mass? What separates
the left now from the left then? Colleges and universities continue to
be hotbeds of far-left thinking and protest, yet I don't see, yet, an
effective coalition to sway the mind of the Big Middle. Given your '60s
experiences and your wisdom now brought by age and reflection, why do
you think that is?

you are absolutely right that the parallels are fantastic and close.
i think there is a mass opposition to the bush policies, reflected most
dramatically on feb. 15, 2003 when millions of people mobilized before
the trigger was even pulled, to say to to war, the bullying of
american power, and the threat of a new imperialism run completely off
the track. how to sustain that opposition, how to mobilize it, how to
direct it and lead it -- these are huge questions that we will only
find the answers to as we struggle to transform ourselves and our
cultural expressions forms and institutions, and as we struggle to
contend for power. in the 60s all the mvmts were influenced by and in a
sense led by the great upheaval of african american citizens for civil
and human rights. further, working class kids drafted into the
imperial army returned home and told horrifying stories about what they
were asked to do in vietnam. a third factor was that a large number
of us who saw the end to war and empire as our vocation set out to
organize our fellow citizens to knock on doors, to circulate petitions,
to mobilize everyone we could to petition our government. today the
government is not in our hands even a little, but the lesson we can
draw is that it could be and it should be and we better get busy.

I think the difference is that the people in power are less suspectible to
any kind of pressure at all, and they have become less and less accountable
in a number of ways (most notably by concentration of media ownership). The
arising of a large and well-funded gang of disinformation-spewing pundits --
not just in the right-owned press but also masqueradng as private citizens
gathering signatures annd sending letters to the editor -- has served to push
dissent from the other side right off the page.

Hmmm. All that, maybe, but also the loss of interest, I think, in
politics by Boomers, at least to a degree, who back in the Reagan era
began to reach the time in their lives when family finances rather than
world peace became the at-home primary concern. When income and
expenses occupy your time and effort, I think the tendency is to become
more conservative, because it's easier for the Big Middle to feel
comfortable with the status quo rather than in a time of change, at
least in terms of money.
Bill, is this trend reflected at all in your own family's life or in
the lives of your peer-group friends?

Dave---The concentratoon of media,etc.is surely worrisome,but the
media never embraced a left perspective.The NY Times was prowar thru
1968,Walter Kronkite called the facist General Ky the George Washington
of Vietnam...It's true that a few honest reporters broke thru in time
and one lesson the imperialists learned was don't let citizens
including reporters near the front...they might say anything,even the
truth.
This calls for a new era of pamphleteering,a reblossoming of an
ancient art form,and your doing it right now...So is Zinn,Roy,Chomsky
and others...

Steve,there is adeep distrust of politics among the young as well,and
for good reason.Somehow we must find creative ways to bring the best of
the social left---decentralized,issue oriented,activist--into
combinations that link issues toward a deeper and more sustained
engagement and understanding of power and the possibility of
transformation.But how?

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